Ten years ago, before he'd even dreamed of doing standup, Russell Kane was a lowly advertising copywriter called Russell Grineau. Not the easiest of names, so he changed it by deed poll – to Lord Russell Grineau, and promoted the stunt through the press and Radio 4. His days of trouble getting seats in restaurants and the theatre were over.

Now that surname has been supplanted to make comperes' lives easier; and Lord has been dropped too, since it wouldn't be a good look for this emphatically unaristocratic comic, whose articulate Essex-boy shtick has propelled him to the top of UK standup. But self-ennoblement, or being "more than just a guy from a council estate", is still what Kane is about. Now 31 – though some press cuttings suggest he's 36 – he delivers comedy that's intensely engaged with class. Success, he says, has been one long battle against "where I came from". According to his demons, he might return there any moment.

This, then, is a comic for whom Tears of a Clown might have been written. In fact, by the end of our interview, Kane is citing "very private disorders" and "depressive symptoms I don't want to go into". How did it come to this? I wanted to talk about his show, Manscaping, his best yet. The comic highlight of my Edinburgh fringe, and now touring, it's a rumination on masculinity, singledom and being condescended to in the first-class compartment of a train.

The set felt fresh, in part, because it eschewed Kane's signature subject: his Essex upbringing and his macho dad. The three shows that preceded it ranged obsessively over his relationship with his father, a sheet-metal worker and "the silverback of all that is negative", the archetypal anti-intellectual, confidence-destroying working-class patriarch. "Anyone who's seen my comedy will know I've got severe father issues," says Kane, "and that I transpose the attention I didn't get there into getting laughter."

Kane grew up ignorant of standup, save for his dad's Roy "Chubby" Brown videos, in a house devoid of books. He came to "romanticise knowledge and people who went to university". He got there himself, though, to Middlesex University, and then into advertising. But he still felt "like an emotional bonsai". It took the father's death, from a heart attack in 2004, to free the son. Kane took up standup. "I don't think we'd be sitting here today, I don't think I'd have a Foster's comedy award, none of that would have happened if he hadn't died."

Kane presumably wouldn't be wearing mascara, either. His excuse is that he's just been on ITV's Daybreak, but that still doesn't explain the vertical take-off hairdo that makes him, as he says, look like "Jedward's aborted triplet". Camp, flouncey and hyperactive is Kane's style. The voice is baroque verbiage in an estuary accent, and the content socially engaged and intelligent. Manscaping is about the identity crisis he's been pitched into since splitting from his wife this year. "I'm in the middle of a breakdown or an invigorating rebirth," he says, as motor-mouthed in person as he is on stage. "I change how I look every day. I change the type of girl I'm dating. I change the books I'm reading."

Manscaping itemises the roles available to the modern single male. It turns on two choice anecdotes of one-night-stands gone wrong, as Kane struggles to live up to someone else's lairy ideal. "We've not been concentrating on what's happened to our little boys growing up on a diet of oversexualised imagery. Regardless of how we evaluate feminism, or post-feminism, it's had a journey between the 60s and now. Whereas masculinity has not really had a political narrative. We're just like, 'Kim Kardashian's tits look great,' and that's where it ends."

Kane's act plays on the tension between this erudition and his origins – some even accuse him of simplifying the contrasts between posh and poor. But class supplies a tension in his career, too: Kane straddles highbrow (his spoof Shakespeare play, Fakespeare, was performed at the RSC) and lowbrow (he's the inhouse jester/presenter on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here) and he doesn't know which way to jump. Not only that, he's just written a novel about a comedy critic. "The day I signed the deal, I was also torso of the week in Heat. Now if that's not someone with his feet in both camps!"

But Kane, whose highest-profile moment was impersonating Beyoncé for Comic Relief this year, is defiantly unsnobby about trash TV. "I've got no back-up plan. This could be how I pay my mortgage. So I do my best job and be as funny as I can." He has yet to be offered his own show on radio or TV, which is where those private disorders kick in. "My bete noir is my confidence. Everything, for me, is a sign that I'm not going to make it. 'Why am I not on this show? I must be shit.' That's how it is all the time. That's my battle."

Kane is prone to violent rages and "hateful, terrifying" stage fright, both of which he blames on his upbringing. "If the part of the brain that deals with the regulation of impulse isn't cultivated between the ages of 18 months and eight," he says, citing recent research, "it's retarded and will never grow. So people like us, who had weird relationships with our fathers or had no father, all we can ever do is feel the urge to smash up the living room because I can't find my keys. Or not stop Googling something spiteful about myself, throwing up and thinking my career's over.

"So what am I going to do when the audiences thin out, and I'm no longer the next big thing? I'm not arrogant enough to think that can't be me. Have I got the emotional equipment to cope with that?" A pause, then Kane's face breaks into a grin. "Have I overshared?"

Well, this anxiety is certainly a surprise, given Kane's professional swagger. "But when I grab the microphone, that's where I'm at home," he says. "I feel like anyone in the audience from anywhere could be wearing any item of clothing and doing any job, and I could make it funny. I'm that powerful."